An embodiment of the game the world loves

PERUVIAN midfielder Ramon Mifflin once said: “I never see anybody sleep like Pelé. Once, when we play for Santos, I see him sleep from Brussels to Tokyo. Twenty-six hours, half a world, Pelé never opens his eyes.”

Perhaps, that was the only way to shut off the world, which, according to Shep Messing, Pelé’s teammate at Cosmos, “badly wanted to touch him, talk to him or get an autograph on an airline napkin”.

“It is sometimes the only way to be alone,” Pelé told Messing. “Very simple to close the eyes.”

Very simple: like him dummying the defenders and scoring incredible goals. Simple like Pelé playing football.

The night before Pelé played his final professional game, Messing stopped by his room in their hotel to hang out and see how he was feeling. Messing wondered what Pelé could be thinking with just a 90-minute game for the championship standing between 22 years of glory and retirement. “He was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a lime-green jacket and a sphinx-like smile,” writes Messing.

When he asked Pelé about the final game, Pelé said: “When I retired from Santos (his Brazilian club), it was different. I still play many exhibitions, still busy with the football. Now it is really the finish. I will stop playing and that part of me…” Pelé paused, smiling again, “That part will die. But it’s okay because another life will be born. In my mind, it will be hard. I think someday I will wake up and get my things and go to the stadium because this is what I do all of my life.”

Pele has died.

Perhaps, it is our folly that we thought Pelé would never die because football, the game which he turned into ‘The Beautiful Game’, will never die.

Perhaps.

Now that Pelé has died — at the age of 82 — we are left wondering if he was really different from football itself.

Pelé has died. Like many geniuses who have passed on, and gone into another realm.

Now, let’s come to terms that he was an embodiment of the game the entire world loves.

More than Maradona, Messi and Ronaldo, Pelé was known even in the farthest corners of the world where kids kicked a ball. “More people have seen him play football than any other athlete in any sport, anywhere, at any time. More people know his name and face than any other person who has ever lived; he has been photographed more than any person in history, including movie stars and statesmen. He has visited eighty-eight countries, has met with ten kings, five emperors, seventy presidents, and forty other chiefs of state, including two popes. He is an honorary citizen of more cities and countries than any person in history,” writes Robert L Fish, who co-authored with Pelé, My Life and the Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Pelé.

Pelé was a hero wherever he went; he transcended borders of language, culture and political divisions. Presidents waited for hours to have a word with him, the crowd stormed the stadium when he was sent off the ground.

“In Nigeria, a two-day truce was declared in the tragic war with Biafra so that both sides could see him play; the Shah of Iran waited three hours at an international airport just to be able to speak with Pelé and be photographed with him. Frontier guards of Red China left their posts and came into Hong Kong to see him and compliment him when they heard he was there. In Colombia, when Pelé was sent from the game for arguing a referee’s decision, the crowd stormed the field, the referee had to be rescued by the police, a linesman was hastily appointed referee, and Pelé was forced to come back into the game…” adds Fish.

Like all genius footballers, Pelé, a three-time World Cup winner, played with skill, speed and imagination. Bobby Moore, England’s captain in 1966, called him the most complete player he had ever seen. “Two good feet. Magic in the air. Quick. Powerful. Could beat people with skill. Could outrun people. Only 5ft 8in tall, yet he seemed a giant of an athlete on the pitch. Perfect balance and impossible vision.”

Pelé had done 50 years ago all the dribbling tricks we now see the superstars do. His skill and speed were amazing, and his imagination left his opponents hapless.

He was born into a poor family in Tres Coracoes in southern Brazil on October 23, 1940. He was christened Edson Arantes do Nascimento, which, he revealed in a 2014 tweet, was in honour of US inventor Thomas Edison as electricity had just been introduced to his hometown.

Pelé was not the first footballer in his family. His father, João Ramos do Nascimento, was a professional football player known as Dondinho. Pelé himself had admitted that his father was good in the game but was unlucky to make it big. Since he couldn’t make it to the top, the family struggled but Dondinho couldn’t help as football was the only thing he knew. “…Football was the thing my father knew and the thing he enjoyed doing most, so he stayed with it despite the constant haranguing of my mother, and despite the needs of his growing family. He lived in the hope that one day he would be asked to play for an important club in a major city, and then we’d all be out of the woods and living like kings.”

Pelé’s mother, Dona Celeste, wanted her boy to become a doctor, not a footballer. “Not if I can help it! One football player in the family is enough. Enough? It’s too many! This one is going to be a doctor; he’s going to amount to something. A football player? Don’t wish him bad luck!” Pelé writes in his autobiography.

When Pelé played his final game, half for Santos and half for Cosmos with 77,000 fans selling out Giants Stadium, the game ended with the rain teeming down. This is how Messing remembers it: “I, with the rest of his teammates, lifted Pelé on our shoulders to take him around the stadium for a victory lap one last time. As the crowd roared and we ended our lap around the field, Pelé whispered, ‘one more time…’”

Pelé has died. Now, let’s come to terms with it: he was not just football, he played it like nobody else.